Martin's polyhedraA polyhedra generator using Martin's method
Works best if monitor is set to 800 by 600 and full screen is set (press F11 for full screen).
To run enter a numeric value in the "Points?" field and hit enter.
At first stick to values under 20 and ignore the 2 tiles at the top left
The middle tile contains the colors of the first 12 edge lengths, this is to help spotting symmetries.
When ready to learn more read the text following the applet.
The program works by
Computing for each point the force vector that would act on it if there was an inverse square law repulsive force.
Moving the point using the force vector.
Iterating the above 2 steps till a steady state is reached.

A major problem with this program is exiting the repulsion loop. 3 exits are provided. If values for "final t", "final its" or "final f" occur.its are iterations. t is the cosine of the angle between a vertice and the vector acting on it (as t approaches 1 the polyhedra is closer to finished)f is the constant used in the calculation of the repulsive force that is F=f/(dist)2. The way this behaves is fairly strange. If the value of f is too high the value of t will not go down under iteration. Some polyhedra appear to have ideal values for f. This program starts f at the value in "start f". Every time the value of t goes down after 10 iterations f is reduced by 5%. To see why I did this set start f to say 2.0 and points to say 37 you should see the value of t just bump around till f gets to be low then t will move to 1.0 quickly.
The last tile has the running values of t its and f. You may need to move the slide bars to the start to see them.
Once the polyhedra is finished a data report is appended to the last tileAnton Sherwood's links pageBack to Bob's Index Page